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THE BOHEMIAN QUESTION 



BY 



CpARLES PERGLER 

Cresco, Iowa 






Publication No. 1138 

Reprinted from America's Relation to the World Conflict 

Vol. LXXII of The Annals of the 

American Academy of Political and Social Science 

Philadelphia, July, 1917 



By 



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"P. 



Reprinted from The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social 

Science, Philadelphia, July, 1917. 

Publication No. 1138. 



THE BOHEMIAN QUESTION 

By Charles Pergler, 
Cresco, Iowa. 

The exit of Turkey from Europe is now a question of a short 
time. Russia is no more an autocracy, and henceforth will be a 
democratically governed country. Thus remains unsolved only 
one major international problem involving the rights of small 
nations, speaking of nations in the ethnical sense and as distinguished 
from stales. The allied note to President Wilson demands the 
liberation of Italians, Slavs, Roumanians and Czecho-Slovaks 
from foreign domination. The Czechs and Slovaks ask for the 
reconstruction of an independent Bohemian-Solvak state. All 
this postulates the dissolution, or at least a very serious diminution, 
of Austria-Hungary. 

The federalization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has be- 
come impracticable, if not wholly impossible. The case of Switzer- 
land is hardly in point. Mr. Toynbee defines nationality as a will 
to cooperate, and a nation as a group of men bound together by the 
immanence of this impulse in each individual. The Swiss have 
developed this will to cooperate, while in Austria it always has been 
unknown, and conditions are such that to hope even for its inception 
would be wholly Utopian. ' Nor can we point to the United States 
of America as an example, because we are after all a nation formed 
by the free will of immigrants of various origins, and with an under- 
lying basis of uniformity of outlook, uniformity of language, and 
uniformity of culture, furnished by the original settlers in this 
country who came from England. 

Nationality is the modern state-forming force. To disregard 
it is to stand in the path of an ultimately irresistible force. The 
historical process of unification of various nationalities, which began 
with the German and Italian aspirations for a national state, ulti- 
mately will be consummated. If it is not completed now, the 
world is due for another convulsion within a relatively short time. 
When this consummation takes place, that Austrian territory in- 
habited by Italians will be joined to Italy, the Roumanians will be 
gathered in one state, there will come into being a Yougo-slav 

1 



2 The Annals of the American Academy 

(South-Slav) state, and Poland will be independent or autonomous. 
If Austria then remains in existence, the only nations left within 
it will be the Germans, the Magyars and the Czecho-Slovaks. 

In this "small Austria" the Czechs and Slovaks would con- 
stitute a minority; the Germans and Magyars would again combine 
to dominate and oppress the Czecho-Slovaks. Austria even so 
mutilated would continue to be a source of strength to Germany, 
and would form a basis for another attempt to realize pan-German 
plans of middle Europe and the consequent conquest of the world. 
The internal conditions of such a state would necessarily be volcanic, 
and Austria would continue to be a menace to European peace. 
We should thus be confronted with a situation which President 
Wilson in his address to the Senate described as the ferment of 
spirit of whole populations fighting subtly and constantly for an 
opportunity to freely develop. To again paraphrase another of the 
President's statements, the world could not be at peace because its 
life would not be stable, because the will would be in rebellion, be- 
cause there would not be tranquillity of spirit, because there would 
not be a sense of justice, of freedom and of right. 

The Austrian question is the Turkish problem in another form. 
Austria can be no more federalized than European Turkey. To 
permit Austria to exist in any form when this war is concluded, is 
merely to delay the solution of a problem that will never down; and 
in the life of nations, as well as individuals, delay and procrastina- 
tion, the tendency to postpone a final decision, are crimes for which 
penalties are sure to follow. We have seen what this penalty is: 
a war devastating civilized countries. 

The suggestions made in certain quarters that a federal con- 
stitution in Austria be one of the conditions of peace shows the 
futility of the hopes to federalize Austria. Those knowing Austro- 
Hungarian conditions need not be convinced that the empire's 
ruling classes would never carry out such conditions in spirit, and 
perhaps not even in letter; the world would not go to war immedi- 
ately to force Austria to comply with such a condition of peace, 
and thus the germs of a future war, brought about by our failure to 
see clearly now, would be permitted to exist. 

A liberal Russia will be what Russia always claimed to have 
been: a protector of the small Slav nationalities. With Russia 
liberalized, the spirit of nationalism, which must not be confounded 
with chauvinism, will be intensified, and Russia will never again 



The Bohemian Question 3 

look with equanimity upon the Asiatic oppression of Slovaks by the 
Magyars, to cite a single illustration. This again shows the neces- 
sity of a final solution, and the danger of compromise and temporiz- 
ing. 

The Czechs have proven the possibility of independence by 
their economic and cultural development. Economically and 
financially the Czech countries are the richest of the present Austrian 
"provinces," and when freed of oppressive taxation, discriminating 
in favor of financially "passive" Austrian lands, the independent 
Bohemian-Slovak state would be even richer. At the present time 
62.7 per cent of the burden of Austrian taxation is borne by the 
Czech countries, while the rest of Austria carries only 37.3 per cent. 

It should be emphasized that the economic strength of the new 
states would be reinforced by the undeveloped resources of Slovakia, 
the inhabitants of which form a part of the same ethnic group as the 
Bohemians, and desire to be joined with the Bohemians in one state. 
This presents no diflficulty, since the Slovaks live in one part of the 
Hungarian kingdom, and are not scattered in isolated groups. For 
that matter, the world has about realized that in provoking the 
great war the Magyar oligarchy was particeps criminis; this war 
was not only a German war, but it was a Magyar war as well. 

The Bohemian-Slovak state would thus consist of the lands of 
the crown of St. Wenceslaus, viz., Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and 
Slovakia, so that it would have a population of over twelve million 
inhabitants, and a territorial extent of fifty thousand English 
square miles, while Belgium has only eleven thousand, three hun- 
dred seventy-three square miles. Therefore it would not be a small 
state, being in fact eighth among twenty-two European states. 

After all, the belief in the necessity of large states is largely a 
product of German mechanistic political philosophy and political 
economy. Already voices have arisen that certain states have 
become too large to manage. Mr. Louis D. Brandeis has shown 
that even under modern conditions certain business units can be- 
come so large as to be physically incapable of successful administra- 
tion. May this not be equally true of states, especially polyethnic 
states? 

If it be said that it is hard to reconstruct a state, or organize 
a new one, permit me to answer that it was not easy to organize the 
United States of America, and the period of experimentation under 



4 The Annals of the American Academy 

the Articles of Confederation was full of trials and tribulations. 
For a long time it was a question whether in America we should 
have an aggregation of loose-jointed states, or whether a foundation 
for a real nation would be laid. Yet those architects of human 
society, to borrow an expression of Walter Lippmann, relative to 
Alexander Hamilton, who after our revolution held in their hands 
the destiny of this nation, did not shrink from undertaking the task. 
It is objected occasionally that the new state would have no 
direct access to the sea. Access to the sea is important, but, with 
modern methods of communication, not as important as it was in 
the past. The sea after all is a means of communication; whether 
these means be the ocean, or the railroad, it makes little difference 
if the country is confronted by high tariffs. Again, the solution 
of this problem has been suggested by a number of writers, and by 
President Wilson in his address to the Senate, wherein he advocates 
the granting of economical rights of way to landlocked states in the 
following language : 

So far as practicable, moreover, every great people now struggling toward 
a full development of its resources and of its powers should be assured a direct 
outlet to the great highways of the sea. Where this cannot be done by the cession 
of territory it can no doubt be done by the neutralization of direct rights of way 
under the general guarantee which will assure the peace itself. With a right 
comity of arrangement no nation need be shut away from free access to the open 
paths of the world's commerce. 

It should also be remembered that a direct connection could be 
established with the new Yougo-slav state with its harbors on the 
Adriatic. 

It is also true that the future Bohemian-Slovak state will have 
a German minority; but in central and eastern Europe hardly any 
state can be constructed without certain national minorities. In 
the present instance the minority is not as large as would seem on the 
basis of the false Austrian and Magyar statistics. But it will 
certainly be easier to safeguard the interests of a German and 
Magyar minority in a Bohemian-Slovak state than it would be to 
protect the rights of Bohemians and Slovaks in a deformed Austria, 
or to force Austria to become a federal state. 

This question of national minorities will of course have to be 
worked out in detail, but judging from the way Bohemian cities and 
communes have handled the problem of German minority schools. 



The Bohemian Question 5 

it may be safely predicted that there will be no oppression of Ger- 
man minorities, no more than there was during the centuries that 
Bohemia was an independent state. 

A leading advocate of permanent peace recently suggested t'hat 
the question of national minorities might be solved to a large degree 
by a system of judicious exchange of such minorities, or of various 
members thereof. This gentleman had in mind the situation in 
Macedonia, but the suggestion is worth considering in other con- 
nections. For instance, Vienna has a large number of Bohemians, 
and the question of the Bohemian minority in this city has always 
been quite acute. A large number of these people might be repa- 
triated and their place taken by Germans living in Bohemia, who 
originally were colonists in any event. It goes without saying that 
such repatriation would have to be voluntary, but if once undertaken 
should be facilitated by the respective governments. 

One cannot help remarking that prior to this war those now 
worrying over the possible oppression of a German minority by a 
majority of Czecho-Slovaks were little concerned about the oppres- 
sion of the majority by the minority, which has been going on for 
centuries. It should also be noted that a policy of denationaliza- 
tion of other peoples is one peculiar almost wholly to the Germans. 
After all, there is such a thing as psychology of nations, and the 
Slavs have never been noted for attempts to impose their language 
upon other nationalities. Russia is not an exception to the rule, 
for her reactionary policies were largely due to the Junkers from 
Russian Baltic provinces and to the German bureaucracy. 

The factors thus enumerated, the right of any nation to inde- 
pendence once its possibility is demonstrated, the necessity of dis- 
solving Austria in the interests of permanent peace, I believe to be 
decisive of the Bohemian case. 

I would not even fear the joining of purely German parts of 
Austria to the German Empire. This would carry the principle 
of nationality to its logical conclusion. It would perhaps strengthen 
Germany absolutely, but very seriously weaken her relatively. 
To the German Empire would be added a few million Germans, but 
it would be depHved of the support of a much larger number of 
Slavs, who are now being made use of to fight the battles of their 
bitterest enemy. 

When we consider the Bohemian question in relation to the 



6 The Annals of the American Academy 

whole European problem of small nationalities, it is easily seen that 
it is simplicity itself, for a reconstruction of Europe in accordance 
with the principle of nationality means also the freeing of the 
French and Danes in Germany, the creation of a Yougo-slav state 
and emancipation of Poland. All these questions, whether diflScult 
or easy, must be faced unflinchingly. 

Let us not forget that the Czech question is also one of restora- 
tion. The Hapsburgs were called to the Bohemian throne by the 
free will of the representatives of the Bohemian state, and they under- 
took by solemn oath and pledges to protect and safeguard the 
independence of this state. The violation of such pledges and the 
deprivation of the Czechs of independence by force, do not do away 
with their legal rights, so that the Bohemian case has the strongest 
possible legal sanction. 

The fact that the Czechs at one time had a strong and powerful 
state, well organized, is also a sufficient proof of inherent political 
capacity. 

Bismarck maintained that the power ruling Bohemia rules 
Europe. This best illustrates the importance of the Bohemian 
question as an international problem. Without an independent 
Bohemian-Slovak state permanent peace cannot be realized. 



